Residents raise concerns over bike lanes on La Verne Way in Palm Springs
Changes are coming to La Verne Way in south Palm Springs as the wide streets soon to become narrower for vehicles with bike lanes being installed.
“It’s a very busy thoroughfare and we get a lot of people that come screeching to a halt once they get to a stop sign,” Eleni Austin said.
Austin is a resident who lives on the corner of La Verne Way and South Camino Real in the Twin Palms neighborhood. She’s raising concerns ever since a sign was put up by her home, announcing the project.
It would stretch from South Palm Canyon Drive to Twin Palms Drive, providing what the city says is a route for alternative transportation. Austin believes the bike lanes will only cause more congestion.
“It’s a street used by trucks and big rigs and people transporting things with cars and tiny houses.”
According to the city, the going to take one lane on each side and convert it into bicycle only lanes leaving only one lane for thru traffic for cars. These are concerns some in the city say, they have heard.
“I heard from more people who were against this bike path than were for it,” Mayor pro tem J.R. Roberts said.
He was the lone dissenting vote when construction on the bike path was approved by the Palm Springs city council back in April in a 4-1 vote. Along with traffic concerns, Roberts says he felt bike paths weren’t an effective way to slow down traffic in that neighborhood.
“We can do speed bumps, stop signs,” he said. “There’s lots of other alternatives for slowing down traffic. Using a bike path just for that…that’s not good planning, that’s not a good solution.”
In a city staff report, neighbors did raise concerns to the city council and a follow-up survey in affected neighborhoods did indeed find more opposition to the project than support. The sustainability commission however decided to continue recommending the project go forward, saying follow-up discussions after the survey revealed neighbors “misunderstood the proposed design”, and it would make the road safer. The La Verne Way project also added about an additional $156,000 to the approximately $459,000 already allocated to a city-wide bike path project.
“Didn’t see the need to spend the money as well,” Roberts said. “What little money the city needed to add to this didn’t make sense to me, because I didn’t think we needed a third route to cover that particular area.”
Austin says she has no problem with the idea of bike paths, but feels the bike traffic on her street is sparse and accommodating them creates an unnecessary burden.
“What I’m not for is tearing down from four lanes down to two lanes, just in service of the few people that use this as a bike lane,” she said.
The city says it expects the La Verne Way bike lanes to be completed in August.
More: I-Team and Stands for You investigations
Find us on Facebook: KESQ News Channel 3 & CBS Local 2
Follow us on Twitter for breaking news updates: @KESQ & @Local2
We’re on Instagram! @KESQ_News_Channel_3 & @CBSLocal2
Noticias en español: Telemundo 15
